LEARNING : WHY ITS MORE IMPORTANT THAN EDUCATION

“I’m still learning. We’re all still learning and getting sharper. I want to push people to keep learning.”

Damon Morris

Of all the things we spend our time doing, it feels like learning gets a bad rap when we’re growing up. After all, for most of
us, there is an inextricable link between learning and the traditional education structures of schools, colleges and universities. Learning gets thrown into the same bucket with education and for many of us, me included, you get to a certain point when you just throw your hands up and say, “I can’t learn another thing.” It’s totally understandable as we’ve likely been in some kind of formal system since we were four or five years old. Study, stress, tests, repeat.

It blows my mind that we put millions of kids through school every year and expect them all to learn in the same way. If they don’t learn within the current structure, they’re then deemed bad students or a disruptive influence. In researching this chapter I found more people with this same train of thought including Andy Cooke;

“Ask a student a few things about what they are interested in and it gives you a strong indication of how best to teach that person. Ask them if they prefer watching sport, or playing sport. If they would rather write 1,000 words or draw a picture to tell a story. Getting to know that will help leaps and bounds when it comes to educating that person.”

To me it feels like we need to tear education and learning apart and be ok celebrating one without the other, because learning itself is a wonderful thing. Once you realize that learning is something you can do every single day and doesn’t need to mean school or university, it almost expands a part of your brain. It’s as if by learning something, you open up your mind and it becomes more malleable to apply to other tasks. That was my very basic assumption, but on some digging I did actually find some evidence of this.

Christa Sterling, from the Center for Continuous Learning writes, ‘Each and every time we learn something new our brain forms new connections and neurons and makes existing neural pathways stronger or weaker. Some experts call these changes “plasticity” in the brain. Your brain will continue changing right up until the end of your life, and the more you learn along the way, the more your brain will change and the more “plastic” it will be.’

My first big lesson in learning and its importance came in that period of life when we tend to shun most things. I was studying French and German in school and I sharply decided to stop German as quickly as I could. After one year I had zero interest in knowing, ‘wo ist die bahnhhof,’ and I also quit French at 16 too. When would I ever need French? Of course, 18 months later I was getting prepared to move to France for two years in a pretty unforeseen chain of events. And the German? Well, of course a few years later I married Mareike, my German girlfriend with a ceremony in German and so I was wishing I’d paid more attention at school.

That’s the thing. I was studying at school to pass a test. It wasn’t until I was working in a bar in the south of France that I really ‘learnt’ French. I was a glass-washer and bartending in this pub, and no one spoke English so basically, they would just shout instructions at me, and I’d just do my best to under- stand and get the drink orders right.

However, within six weeks I’d learnt more than I had in five years at school and was able to pretty much get most things done in French. It was the same with German. Luckily enough I managed to work in an office in Austria where everyone would speak English to me, but general office chit-chat, phone calls and the radio was all in German, so I was just immersed in it. Again, a couple of months and I was up and running.

What was funny, especially with the French, was I had a friend who went to college for French and got great grades, but when in France she wasn’t actually happy or confident enough to speak it, whereas I could get by pretty well with my limited knowledge and outgoing nature.

That example sums it up pretty good. You may have a piece of paper saying you’ve been taught something and can pass a test, but actually learning it? That’s a different matter. In researching this chapter Chris Kendall reached out to me on LinkedIn and summed it up perfectly; “you do not need qualifications, but you do need to learn.”

I was inclined to believe at the outset that learning would be a chapter in this book, but didn’t really realize how deep it resonated with people. I certainly didn’t realize that people would have tattoos about learning adorning their bodies. Andrew Missingham, owner of B&A, the business strategy company, sent me a message on this subject saying. “On my arm I have a tattoo with my life’s purpose: ‘Live to listen. Listen to learn. Learn to share.’ It took me 50 years to discover this purpose. Once I’d found it, I didn’t want to forget it.”

The two elements to pull from that, listening and sharing, are so crucial to taking on board your field of study. Active listen- ing, the kind where you are fully engaged, not just listening whilst texting or watching Netflix, is that kind of listening where you can really get immersed, take notes and understand. The second part is even more interesting as sharing what you’ve learnt is also a great way to sharpen your own tools. It means you’ll need a depth of knowledge to under- stand the concept fully and when you help someone else take it onboard you’ll likely be able to frame it differently for them to understand. This process will then further cement that knowledge in your own brain.

Miles Chamley-Watson, the Olympic fencer has ‘never a loss, always a lesson’ tattooed on him, a phrase he learnt at 18 from his coach that instantly resonated with him. This takes me on nicely to the next concept within this chapter. Failing forward and learning from everything along the way. Again, that’s the difference between education and learning.

You’ve probably used a Dyson product at some point in your life, whether it’s a vacuum cleaner or a hand dryer. The company’s founder, James Dyson is the epitome of failing forward. He had the idea for a bagless vacuum cleaner and made prototype after prototype, making 5,627 before he found a system that worked for him. When I just googled his name, I saw he is now worth $6.2bn. I’d say that’s failing forward at its best.

The Dyson case above is a great example of learning by doing. There are four kinds of learning; visual, audio, reading/writ- ing and kinaesthetic - learning by doing. For some, a hands-on experience allows them to learn things on a much deeper level in terms of retention.

I have two young kids and have seen kinaesthetic learning first- hand as my daughter learnt to walk. She watched her older brother do it and drew from some visual cues before giving it a go herself. It’s a great example of learning by doing. Pull yourself up to stand, test out the legs, try and make the step to a chair just outside of reach, move one foot in front of the other, fall, get back up, try again, fall, try again.

In just a couple of days my daughter was up and walking around. The same concept can be applied throughout life. We may be shaky at first, we may fail a couple of times along the way, but once it’s locked in our memory, we’ll never forget.

Imagine if everyone, when they were babies said, “no I can’t walk.” I know it’s a strange concept talking to nine month old babies, but just think about it. How many people do you meet who say they can’t do something? “I can’t run, I can’t cook, I can’t speak another language.” It happens quite a lot, especially as we get older and people have told themselves enough stories to box themselves into a corner of what their realm of possibility is.

If you take each of those statements and flip them to, ‘how can I?’ The problem becomes an exciting challenge. How can I run? How can I cook? How can I speak another language? I use those three examples as they are particularly true for me. Growing up I always felt that I couldn’t cook. At the time that was actually true. However, when I was 19 I had decided I wanted to work in a hotel in one of the more comfortable jobs as assistant chef. Basically chopping, peeling and cleaning. I thought I could manage that no problem. However, a week into it my head chef decides to leave. So instead of thinking to myself, ‘argh I can’t really cook, I’m lost.’ I asked her to show me everything she does so that I could write it down. I was essentially saying, “how can I become a chef?”

When she left a week later, I was pushed into the position of head chef in a French hotel at the age of 19 cooking for 75 people a day. All using this recipe book we built together. For each recipe we broke it down into the smallest chunks; 1. Chop onions, 2. Sweat onions, 3. Dice and add garlic, 4. Add mushrooms. I was very quickly turning out carbonara, duck a l’orange and tartiflette, along with all kinds of wonderful dishes. Unlearning that ‘I can’t’ mechanism is so important in reevaluating the role of learning.

One of the quotes that jumped out at me when preparing this book was from Keltie O’Connor, the YouTube creator. Maybe it was because it came only a month after his passing, but her words really struck home with me:

“People ALWAYS tell me they want to start a YouTube channel, but waiting for the ‘perfect’ time, or that they need to learn more. I tell them no you learn by just doing. You don’t learn to shoot a basketball by watching videos of Kobe every day, you learn by shooting.”

Perhaps relating a process or lesson to sport helps me visualize better, but it’s so true. Kobe learnt to be the best of his era through a persistence to practice. It wasn’t because he passed a test somewhere along the line.

As soon as we realize that learning is a fun thing, a thing to look forward to, a way to exercise your brain, I think the world will be a better, more informed place. I mean think about going to the gym. People spend hundreds of dollars a month getting a trainer, eating the right stuff, some recovery drinks, the right gear, all in order to help keep their body strong and in check. It’s funny that we don’t put learning on that same pedestal as it’s essentially doing the same thing. It keeps our brains more receptive to new ideas and releases dopamine, making us feel good and want to repeat the experience.

I believe that learning is a constant process of progress and for many of us its what we do after the formal education system has finished that sets us up for the future. Simon Forster spoke to this when we chatted:

“I just know that, certainly anyone I’ve employed, I’ve never really looked at their grades, it’s more about what they’ve done since school.”

Maybe we take learning for granted, or maybe it’s just mis- understood and seen as a burden, rather than an enjoyable ex- perience. Orlando Von Einsiedel has travelled pretty much the entire world for his film career and understands that perhaps we’re in a society where we are massively underselling the process of learning. “I didn’t appreciate education at all at that age. I think I definitely took it all for granted. Knowing what I know now, it makes me look at it differently. I spend a lot of my life in places where education is not a right, it’s a privilege. If I could go back to myself I’d say, appreciate the moment, appreciate what you have right now. This is an incredible privilege that you’ve got to be educated, to learn and gain all of that knowledge.”

Even Elon Musk has spoken about the fact that studying and learning are two different things:

“I think college is basically for fun and to prove you can do chores, but they are not learning. You can learn anything for free.”

We all need to shift that narrative in our own head and split learning and education. Maybe that’s where The Dingo will take his Find your Grind idea and the potential for more vocational learning. Oriel, the Spotify creative director spoke about a similar notion in creative industries, how we should begin looking at those roles the same way we do as trades and reduce the amount of time studying in the classroom.

Passing tests wasn’t a strength of mine and so I struggled to learn something in an educational environment. For me the learning started when I was on my own, making my mistakes, learning as I go. That’s where we need to pull apart learning and education because once you look beyond passing tests and see learning as an ongoing life pursuit, you’ll be able to achieve more than you ever thought possible.

An excerpt from The Anti Blueprint Project, with Maxi Meisberger, teacher, surfer and great person to speak to in terms of understanding the relationship between learning and education.